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…From envy, hatred and malice; and from all want of charity;
Good Lord, deliver us…
1 John 3:15-17 (The Message)
14-15 The way we know we’ve been transferred from death to life is that we love our brothers and sisters. Anyone who doesn’t love is as good as dead. Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know very well that eternal life and murder don’t go together.
16-17 This is how we’ve come to understand and experience love: Christ sacrificed his life for us. This is why we ought to live sacrificially for our fellow believers, and not just be out for ourselves. If you see some brother or sister in need and have the means to do something about it but turn a cold shoulder and do nothing, what happens to God’s love? It disappears. And you made it disappear.
From Phil:
There is a lot of meanness in the world, and sooner or later someone will be mean to you. There are mountains of hatred and malice with which we contend. We spend days and months crossing deserts where there is no love to be found, or as the ancient prayer invokes is devoid of “all want of charity”. We will all face malice and a lack of love from people. Racism, class-ism, the haves and the have-nots surround us, holding us down from rising up, or demanding that we give up what we have. I pray to God to deliver me and others from envy, hatred, malice and lack of love the World delivers several times a day. Those prayers are easy to say.
My problem is that I rarely ask God to deliver me from all this same nastiness I carry around in me. It’s one thing for me to point out envy and selfishness in you, quite another to shine the light on me. Nevertheless it’s there. I get jealous, I covet, I hate and hold grudges. I nurture my pain, holding on to it just so I can be reminded of what someone did to me. I long for the time to have my own “revenge” tour. I lack love, I am mean, sarcastic, critical, snobbish, arrogant and sometimes just plain awful.
When I read the passage above, and apply it to my heart, that ancient prayer means something different. Sure enough I want the world to be different, but Jesus says the World and people don’t change until I do. Envy, hatred, malice rule over me and love is lost until I change first, until I am delivered from the darkness in me.
Please Lord deliver me from me. Perhaps then, with me in You and You in me, maybe we can do something about the darkness beyond.
So here we are in Lent, the season to search your soul. Take out those dark things, repent of them, place them where they belong, at the feet of Jesus. Now watch, things will change, we change, we get transformed, and the peace of God begins to guard our souls. Romans 12:1-2. Peace guards us from envy, from hatred, from all malice from within and without. Finally, when we are at peace, we are free to love. That’s how deliverance begins.
Peace, Phil Parsons
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From Rodger:
Ah… doesn’t it hit us right between the eyes when the shoe drops and we realize that this Great Litany isn’t so much about fixing what’s wrong with the world… It’s about fixing US! Deliver US! From envy, hatred and malice; and from all want of charity;
What Cranmer didn’t write, but I can’t help but think is clearly intended, is the pronoun “OUR” Deliver us from OUR envy… from OUR hatred… from OUR malice, and from OUR OWN want of charity. All of a sudden, this isn’t academic nor is it hypothetical. It’s about us understanding what Jesus means in places like Matthew 7: 3 – 5, or what he was getting at in Luke 4: 23 – 30.
Matthew 7: 3 – 5: 3 Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.
Luke 4:23 – 30: 23 He said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’ 24 And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown. 25 But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months and there was a severe famine over all the land, 26 yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. 27 There were also many with a skin disease in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” 28 When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. 29 They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. 30 But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.”
The Matthew7 passage almost needs no explanation: If we don’t start with our own deliverance, then we shouldn’t even bother trying to “help” anyone else. You cannot help anyone reach a place you yourself have never obtained.
And we shouldn’t miss in Luke 4: After Jesus shares what would have been a well-known cliche’ to those in his own time and culture. (The idea of “Physician, heal thyself” precedes the New Testament by at least 500 years, most notably appearing in Aesop’s Fables as the story of “The Frog and the Fox.” (Perry index # 289 of Aesop’s Fables.)… We should note how angry and filled with rage his hometown was! So much so, they were ready to murder him by throwing him off the cliff. Let that remind us just how hard the ideas Phil mentions above actually are.
